KINOTEKA – Wojciech Has film retrospective and posters exhibition
Read this article in English
Przeczytaj artykuł w języku polskim
Culture, Events
Accompanying this year’s Wojciech Has film retrospective at the BFI and ICA, Polish Cultural Institute and Kinoteka are proud to present an exhibition of 16 original Polish posters of Has’s films, curated by DI Factory, which will be on display in the BFI and ICA Foyers between the 1st and 26 April.
Following on from past retrospectives on celebrated Polish directors such as Andrzej Wajda and Jerzy Skolimowski, Kinoteka will once again be honouring one of Poland’s greatest filmmakers with a season dedicated to Wojciech Has, in collaboration with BFI Southbank and the ICA.
List of Wojciech Has film retrospective at Kinoteka:
The Saragossa Manuscript
One of the cultiest of all cult films, with a fan base that includes Luis Buñuel, Martin Scorsese and The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, this lavish, sprawling adaptation of Jan Potocki’s classic novel starts off as a lavish widescreen epic set during the Napoleonic era, but the discovery of the manuscript of the title leads to flashbacks to the time of the Spanish Inquisition, as the characters tell complex, increasingly intertwining stories whose supernatural elements ensure that nothing is ever quite as it initially appears. A bewildered-looking Zbigniew Cybulski provides the emotional anchor in one of his signature performances.
Dir: Wojciech Jerzy Has
Cast: Zbigniew Cybulski, Iga Cembrzyńska, Elżbieta Czyżewska, Gustaw Holoubek, Stanisław Igar
After a decade spent making mostly non-fiction short films, Wojciech Jerzy Has delivered one of the most powerful Polish feature debuts of the 1950s, adapted from a story by Marek Hłasko and staged in a baroque symbol-strewn style that Has would quickly make his own. Long-term alcoholic Kuba Kowalski (a riveting Gustaw Holoubek) has an appointment booked at a drying-out clinic, but not for several more hours, and he finds the sparsely Beckettian décor of his flat too oppressive to spend much time in. Surely a trip to a nearby café and bar won’t cause any problems?
Plus Birch Street (Ulica Brzozowa, 1947), a short film co-directed with Stanisław Różewicz, about the renovation of a badly war-damaged Warsaw street.
Dir: Wojciech Jerzy Has
Cast: Gustaw Holoubek, Aleksandra Śląska, Teresa Szmigielówna, Tadeusz Fijewski, Stanisław Milski
Born into an aristocratic family that he despises, Paweł (Tadeusz Janczar) impulsively runs off with taxi dancer Lidka (Maria Wachowiak), a fiercely independent-minded woman who knows how to put him and any other man firmly in his place; their romance is unsurprisingly short-lived. Soon afterwards, the Nazis invade Poland, Paweł ends up in Auschwitz, and he and Lidka meet again five years later in a completely different, war-ravaged environment, albeit one where the old Polish aristocracy is still clinging to old traditions and Lidka has since married into it. Has’s film fully captures the irony of Stanisław Dygat’s celebrated 1948 novel.
Dir: Wojciech Jerzy Has
Cast: Maria Wachowiak, Tadeusz Janczar, Gustaw Holoubek, Stanisław Jaworski, Stanisław Milski
On the eve of WWII, Felicja (Barbara Krafftówna) and Wiktor (Zbigniew Cybulski) star in a production of Hamlet – he’s an established star, she’s a hesitant debutant. But their relationship shifts radically he’s forced to go into hiding and she conceals him in her flat for years. But an ungrateful Wiktor deeply resents this confinement; like all actors, he constantly craves an audience and is oblivious of the damage that his selfishness is doing to Felicja both professionally and personally. For sheer emotional range, Krafftówna gives one of the greatest female performances in Polish film history, and Cybulski one of his bravest.
Dir: Wojciech Jerzy Has
Cast: Barbara Krafftówna, Zbigniew Cybulski, Artur Młodnicki, Wieńczysław Gliński, Wiesław Golas
In an attempt to resolve various present-day problems, Tadeusz (Jan Kreczmar) searches obsessively for his son Jędrek, missing since WWII and probably dead, the “codes” of the title referring to tiny scraps of sometimes conflicting information gleaned from possibly unreliable witnesses, which Tadeusz tries to patch into a coherent portrait. But this obsessive quest merely alienates him further from his wife and surviving son, the latter played by Zbigniew Cybulski as a man wrestling with his own WWII-era demons. As ever in Wojciech Has’s films, the past is a strange and forbidding era, with which we can never fully come to terms.
Dir: Wojciech Jerzy Has
Cast: Jan Kreczmar, Zbigniew Cybulski, Ignacy Gogolewski, Irena Korecka, Janusz Kłosiński
Screening 1: 06 Apr, 14:30
Screening 2: 12 Apr, 12:10
ICA The Mall, St. James SW1Y 5AH
At the turn of the 1930s, a group of students and self-styled artist-intellectuals shares a single room in a Warsaw tenement house because that’s all they can afford, while working out how they can fit into pre-WWII Polish society while still maintaining their independence of spirit, expressed most frequently in a sarcastic, darkly comic take on things happening around them. Not for the first time in a Wojciech Has film, Gustaw Holoubek steals every scene he’s in as an eccentric friend of theirs, with a beard so distinctive that a woman asks him if he grew it for erotic reasons.
Dir: Wojciech Jerzy Has
Cast: Mieczysław Gajda, Gustaw Holoubek, Adam Pawlikowski, Anna Łubieńska, Beata Tyszkiewicz
Has’s first film in a decade was this wistful adaptation of a Chekhov short story, depicting a routine couple of days in the life of an elderly professor (Gustaw Holoubek) dealing with tedious professional and personal matters while musing about whether his long life has any particularly significant meaning. He loathes his daughter’s fiancé, despairs at his students’ intellectual unadventurousness, and the one person that he truly likes, Katarzyna (Hanna Mikuć), turns out to have problems of her own. The title is, of course, ironic: the events may be routine, but they construct a psychological portrait of a complicated man.
Dir: Wojciech Jerzy Has
Cast: Gustaw Holoubek, Hanna Mikuć, Anna Milewska, Elwira Romańczuk, Janusz Gajos
Middle-aged actress Magdalena (Lidia Wysocka) returns to her home town for the first time in years to attend her grandfather’s funeral and receive her inheritance. But this inevitably involves dealing with people (including former suitors) who vividly remind her of why she left in the first place, and inheriting his house would only complicate matters. The only person she feels any affinity with is the much younger Olek (Władysław Kowalski), whom she meets by chance at the start, and who is both unconnected to her past and from a different generation. But is there any hope of a lasting connection?
Dir: Wojciech Jerzy Has
Cast: Lidia Wysocka, Władysław Kowalski, Gustaw Holoubek, Adam Pawlikowski, Zbigniew Cybulski
Plus Harmonia (1947), Has’s solo directing debut, a short film about an impoverished boy’s dream of owning an accordion.
First Harvest (Pierwszy plon, 1950) – co-directed with Jan Zelnik
Centralized Control of the Production Process (Scentralizowana kontrola przebiegu produkcji, 1951)
Herbalists of the Stone Valley (Zielarze z Kamiennej Doliny, 1952)
Johnny’s Bird Feeder (Karmik Jankowy, 1952)
Scouts at the Rally (Harcerze na zlocie, 1952)
Cultural Review No. 2/53 (Przegląd kulturalny Nr 2/53, 1953)
Our Ensemble (Nasz zespół, 1955)
Dir: Wojciech Jerzy Has
(The Birch Street co-directed by Stanisław Różewicz, First Harvest co-directed by Jan Zelnik, Scouts at the Rally co-directed by Stanisław Urbanowicz)
By the time he made his first feature The Noose, Wojciech Has had already been making his own films for a decade. Made when still in his early twenties, Birch Street is a poetic documentary study of a war-ravaged Warsaw street being painstakingly returned to civilisation, while Harmonia was his fiction debut, the story of an impoverished boy’s dream of obtaining an accordion – and both films already reveal Has’s characteristic preoccupation with objects and ornate decoration and the conflict between dream and reality in embryonic form.
Thereafter, Has worked as a documentary director for WFD, albeit entirely during the period of compulsory Socialist Realism. After falling foul of the authorities with My Town (a portrait of his native Kraków that was considered too personal), Has was on his best career-preserving behaviour with the later films, but they still nonetheless occasionally show a personal touch, on top of their inherent historical fascination as vivid snapshots of a particular historical and ideological period. The most ambitious is Our Ensemble, Has’s first film in colour, a nearly 40-minute portrait of a traditional folk ensemble studded with musical numbers staged imaginatively enough to confirm that Has was ready to move into feature films.
Screening 1: 12 Apr, 14:30
ICA The Mall, St. James SW1Y 5AH
Tickets: here
The Doll
–
A big-budget widescreen adaptation of Bołeslaw Prus’s novel, this was Wojciech Has’s first colour feature. Former brewery clerk Stanisław Wokulski (Mariusz Dmochowski) has returned to late 1870s Warsaw after a prolonged exile in Siberia for his revolutionary activities, and his various highly successful business activities (including arms dealing) have the primary aim of wooing Izabela (Beata Tyszkiewicz), daughter of a bankrupt aristocrat. But despite Stanisław’s financial acumen, he will always be part of the “wrong” social class thanks to him living in what he calls “a deformed country”. The ravishing score is by Wojciech Kilar, his only collaboration with Has.
An opulently strange and hallucinatory masterpiece that filters Bruno Schulz’s elusive and elliptical novella (with other Schulz stories stirred into the mix) through Has’s own familiar obsessions. Like most Has protagonists, Józef (Jan Nowicki) is trying to access the past, in this case by visiting his father (Marek Kondrat) in a sanatorium that turns out to be a portal to a world based as much on Józef’s fears and long-suppressed memories as it is on objective reality. Stylistically, the film recalls Orson Welles at his most florid, with Jerzy Maksymiuk’s atonal score brilliantly integrated into the overall texture.
Dir: Wojciech Jerzy Has
Cast: Jan Nowicki, Tadeusz Kondrat, Irena Orska, Halina Kowalska, Gustaw Holoubek
During WWI, three men share a prison cell: journalist Rafał (Wojciech Wysocki), notorious safecracker Szpicbródka (Zszisław Wardejn) and former monk Sykstus (Jan Peszek). While awaiting formal charges over publishing a satirical and anticlerical magazine, Rafał makes extensive notes about his strikingly different cellmates in the hope that they’ll eventually fuel a great novel – but as he succumbs to the delirium of typhus, reality and fantasy begin to blur. This blurring is familiar territory for Has, but what’s fascinatingly new is his vivid realisation of the creative process and the struggle involved with turning raw factual material into compelling fiction.
Dir: Wojciech Jerzy Has
Cast: Wojciech Wysocki, Gustaw Holoubek, Janusz Michałowski, Jan Peszek, Zdzisław Wardejn
James Hogg’s celebrated 1824 genre-bending novel could almost have been written as a source text for a Wojciech Has film. In a wittily cinematic substitute for the book’s manuscript being discovered by grave robbers nestling within its author’s coffin, the similarly exhumed corpse of Robert (Piotr Bajor) comes back to life to guide us through his traumatic life story, which includes regular visitations from a Doppelgänger, possibly the reincarnation of the devil himself, who persuades Robert to commit vile crimes on his behalf, including the murder of close relatives.
Dir: Wojciech Jerzy Has
Cast: Piotr Bajor, Maciej Kozłowski, Janusz Michałowski, Hanna Stankówna, Ewa Wiśniewska
Wojciech Has’s final film (is set in 16th-century Germany, beset by plague and religious persecution and rocked by the introduction of printing as a means of disseminating subversive ideas. After fleeing the Inquisition, young Balthazar (Rafał Wieczyński) and the alchemist Friedrich Cammerschulze (Michel Lonsdale, dubbed by Has’s favourite actor Gustaw Holoubek) travel across the country before ending up in Venice. This being a Wojciech Has film, the people they encounter range from the corporeal (priests, cabbalists, the latter echoing The Saragossa Manuscript) to the fantastical (the ghosts of Balthazar’s mother and twin brother, the Archangel Gabriel).
Dir: Wojciech Jerzy Has
Cast: Rafał Wieczyński, Michel Lonsdale, Emmanuelle Riva, Daniel Emilfork, Gabriela Kownacka
To ensure the best experience, we use technologies such as cookies to store and/or access information on your device. Consent to these technologies allows us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique identifiers on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Zawsze aktywne
Storage or access to technical data is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or solely for carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferencje
Przechowywanie lub dostęp techniczny jest niezbędny do uzasadnionego celu przechowywania preferencji, o które nie prosi subskrybent lub użytkownik.
Statistics
Przechowywanie techniczne lub dostęp, który jest używany wyłącznie do celów statystycznych.Technical storage or access that is used solely for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance from the ISP, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved solely for this purpose usually cannot be used to identify you.
Marketing
Storage or technical access is required to create user profiles for the purpose of sending advertisements or tracking a user on a website or on several websites for similar marketing purposes.
